After valiantly defeating the liberals in their ceaseless war on Christmas, President Donald Trump is now promising to protect Thanksgiving from oppressive political correctness.
Except up until Tuesday night, nobody had ever heard of this particular culture war.
“You know, some people want to change the name ‘Thanksgiving,'” Trump said on Tuesday during a campaign rally in Florida, prompting loud boos from the crowd. “They don’t want to use the term ‘Thanksgiving.'”
He compared the nonexistent Thanksgiving controversy to the equally nonexistent Christmas controversy, then patted himself on the back for supposedly ushering in a new era in which “everyone’s using Christmas again.”
“But now we’re gonna have to do a little work on Thanksgiving,” Trump said. “People have different ideas why it shouldn’t be called Thanksgiving.”
“But everybody in this room I know loves the name ‘Thanksgiving’ and we’re not changing it,” he declared.
The crowd went wild — and everyone else scratched their heads.
Trump bizarrely claims some people "want to change the name ‘Thanksgiving.’" pic.twitter.com/Zbk5yHMpxI
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) November 27, 2019
The next morning, even the hosts of “Fox & Friends” were perplexed.
“I don’t think there’s a huge push to change the name of Thanksgiving, is there?” Brian Kilmeade asked.
“Well, you know, I think it was in 2015, there was a rumor that Barack Obama wanted to change the name of Thanksgiving, but that was debunked,” Steve Doocy said.
“So, perhaps what he’s talking about is just all these stories about, you know, your carbon footprint and the amount of energy you use to travel over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house,” he continued, making awkward references to both the musical “Into the Woods” and likely a HuffPost article explaining how one can reduce the environmental impact of their Thanksgiving plans.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade confused by Trump's claims of a war on Thanksgiving: "I don't think there’s a huge push to change the name of Thanksgiving, is there?" pic.twitter.com/TKeFkSUctE
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) November 27, 2019
Doocy didn’t explicitly say which story he was talking about, but as Media Matters writer Parker Molloy laid out in early November, “Fox & Friends” dedicated an entire segment to the HuffPost article on November 7 to moan about how the article was “telling America cancel Thanksgiving.”
And it’s more likely than not that Trump, a voracious consumer of Fox News who frequently quotes its hosts on Twitter, saw the segment and found a new way to rile up his base against the liberal culture war on everything America holds dear.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
